Make It Boring

For many people, money and all its related issues feel stressful, constantly demanding attention. If you’ve lived in financial strain and chaos, it may begin to feel normal, like fighting with money is what money management is. This reality can create a sense that if your finances aren’t actively exciting (or terrifying), something must be wrong.

But in reality, boredom is often a sign your system is doing exactly what it should.

I recently reminded myself of this maxim when I worked out a few systems for the new year to batch certain repeated business tasks. The approach is downright dull, but is highly effective and frees me to give attention to other projects that have been tabled too long, as well as look ahead.

And that’s what boring systems do for us. They free up our attention, time, and energy.

When your bill-pay runs 90% automatically, there’s simply less drama, less activity, fewer decisions, no more urgency. You spend 15 minutes a month checking up on things, rather than 15 minutes a day hemming and hawing.

With that layer in place, you can focus on strategies to increase your savings rate or debt payoff and, likewise, get that next system automated to demand far less of you, while still progressing towards your higher goals.

Each layer of simple, boring systems or processes relieves you of another layer of burden. Things simply hum along in the background without demanding daily, or even weekly, attention and emotional energy.

Sometimes that can feel a bit underwhelming. We get trapped thinking that activity, busyness, even obsession is how we make progress. If you’re not tweaking, reacting, or problem-solving, it can feel like nothing is happening. If we’re not running complex color-coded spreadsheet or budget binder systems, it can feel like we’re not really doing the work.

And this is simply our human nature. At the close of the Revolutionary War, the founding fathers feared building a peacetime government far more than keeping the colonies-turned-states together during wartime. With the uniting excitement of the war passing, what would hold everyone together as a new country with the boring business of things like taxes and lawmaking to face?

But simple, unexciting systems for our own money business should be our goal. And excellent systems are deceptively simple.

We want the systems, the processes, the habits to do the heavy lifting (and even the medium lifting) with limited attention, leaving us free to focus on greater pursuits.

In other words, financial maturity looks boring.

It looks like automated transfers that run whether you’re motivated or not.

It looks like budgets you don’t “feel” most days, but you respect your limits anyway because your built-in constraints require it.

It looks like automated investing that doesn’t require constant monitoring of markets and accounts.

It looks like fewer emotional highs and lows tied to money decisions.

In effect, it’s the calm of peacetime stability, not the urgency and excitement of war.

If you find yourself struggling to establish a system or decide an approach to better manage some aspect of your finances, perhaps ask yourself: “How can I make this as boring as possible?”

That might help you find your answer.